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More play time I am all for but I often think homeschooling coddles kids so much. No chance to develop and face challenges that comes with just living life with other humans.
I commend those who homeschool their children and have fantastic results but saying all public education is terrible and waste I disagree with. Some children thrive in those settings. This idea that public education is a mass failure is a fallacy.
American medical schools are filled with children who went to public schools all their life. From all different types of economic backgrounds.
This idea that public education is a mass failure is a fallacy.
It really isn't. There's no evidence of actual human capital development in government schools and trust me that researchers are trying to find that there is. Smart motivated kids learn stuff on their own and schools take credit for it.
Well if that were the case why did the state develop schools in the first place?
Compliance. Literally, compliance.
Also, why would it be surprising if the state completely failed at achieving a stated objective? That's what normally happens.
But look how many people can read across the economic spectrum.
That alone is worth something?
It's a false attribution. People could read before government school and homeschooled kids read better on average than government school students.
Yeah I would need to do more reading and research to present my position better.
I am taking a mass blanket approach to this topic. Thinking about the agrarian world we emerged from and how many kids were learning to read at that time.
Compared to today when kids aren’t working the farms but in public schools no matter how bad it is are still getting some level of education.
The best comparison point I've heard, and you're right that it's hard to find a great one, is industrial era England.
They were post-agrarian but pre-government schooling and had very high literacy rates, plus it's the most similar culture to ours.
The evidence on what government schools accomplish is truly bleak. I meant it when I said there's no evidence of meaningful learning, in aggregate. All of the gains to education appear to occur at graduation, which means either all learning occurs in that final day of class or government school purely functions as a filtering device.
You're presenting a false choice. There's no reason homeschooled kids can't spend time with their peers and they often do.
Sure, but parents don't select a random subset of peers like school does. Do you think the presumably wealthy parents of homeschooled children will make sure their kids are interacting with poor families? Because those aren't going to be at the private extracurricular clubs.
Another false distinction. Wealthy parents go out of their way to live in catchment areas with other rich parents, specifically to curate who their kids interact with.
Government schools are not even a little bit random. They are for the families that live around them.
This is definitely true and the reality of my upbringing. My public school was often mocked by the other richer school districts.
I was often talked down upon due to my school district being so bad. Looking back it definitely was bad hahaha.
If you put your kid in public school, it's going to interact with poor families. If you homeschool it, it's not. I'm sorry but that's just really obvious to me, given my experience. I guess that's where we'll agree to disagree.
My main point is wealthy parents don't understand the value of their children interacting with poor people.
What's obvious to you is factually incorrect. Ask a realtor about whether school quality matters to parents. Wealthy parents choose wealthy neighborhoods where their kids go to school with other wealthy kids.
My dad taught at a poor school. All the kids there were from poor families. All the rich kids went to a different school.
My main point is wealthy parents don't understand the value of their children interacting with poor people.
That may be true, but they don't want that for their kids and they pay to avoid it.
A lot of parents noticed this during the lockdowns. They'd finish the entire week's material in a few hours, which left many wondering what schools are doing with the other 90% of their kids' time.
What resonated with me was that the author of the article said he and his wife spend 2 hours or less per day teaching their child.
6 hours of classroom instruction = 2 hours or less of home school and then you have the rest of the day for extracurricular activities